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Everything about Magento Extensions, Modules & Plugins
You’re probably familiar with using Chrome extensions—whether it’s for taking screenshots, performing basic SEO checks, identifying fonts on a webpage, finding the hex code of a background color, or countless other tasks. There are hundreds of ways to make use of Chrome extensions.
Similarly, Magento also has its own extensions. However, unlike Chrome extensions, which can be installed with a simple click, Magento extensions come as packaged code and require a bit more effort to set up.
That said, the extensibility is just as powerful. Adding a Magento extension to your platform is like giving it an extra arm—it enhances either the user experience or the store manager’s efficiency.
With Magento extensions, you can track order numbers, analyze demographics, optimize SEO, integrate payment gateways, improve navigation, enhance search functionality, and much more.
But when discussing extensions, it’s important to understand modules and plugins as well.
Let’s break them down one by one.
What are Magento Extensions?
Magento Extensions consist of PHP and XML files that work together to achieve a specific function like adding a payment gateway, improving search, or tracking orders. These files take care of showing information, processing actions, and other extra supporting features.
Some say they are the same as modules. But there is a difference.
Modules are the core files present inside Magento that perform specific functions. But extensions are externally downloaded and connected with your store. Module is a built-in feature whereas an extension is an added component.
Amasty and BSSCommerce are the two most popular websites to download Magento extensions.
What are Magento Plugins?
Speaking of plugins, they also add extra features to your store, but by enhancing existing functionality rather than introducing entirely new features.
For example, suppose your store already displays the total price in the cart. Now, you want to automatically calculate and display the final price, including the delivery cost based on the customer’s address. To achieve this, you’d need a plugin, as it modifies and improves an existing feature.
On the other hand, if you want to add a completely new payment option, like Stripe, you would need a Stripe Magento extension. Unlike plugins, extensions introduce new functionalities rather than modifying existing ones.
What are the Types of Magento Extensions?
There are three types of Magento Extensions:
Magento Marketplace Extensions
The product ecosystem of Magento is so developer-friendly that they can build their own extensions and publish them in the marketplace.
Magento has its own official marketplace with a proper extension quality program to prevent anything spammy from being posted. The program includes clear guidelines and verification tools for the benefit of both users and developers.
You can visit this marketplace to find and use verified third-party extensions. The marketplace offers both free and paid extensions.
Out of the Box Extensions
These extensions come already packaged with the Magento platform. In other words, when you install Magento, these extensions are installed by default. However, to activate them, you’ll need to create separate accounts.
Out-of-the-box extensions are also known as vendor-bundled extensions, and the required accounts must be created with the respective vendors.
Some examples include PayPal & Braintree Payment, dotdigital Engagement Cloud, Live Chat by Zendesk, and Google Shopping Ads Channel.
Custom Extensions
The Magento Marketplace is not the only place to find third-party Magento extensions. Developers worldwide create useful extensions, and you can directly approach them to have a custom extension built.
However, you need to be careful when choosing custom-built extensions. Cheaper options may seem attractive, but they often come with unnecessary code that can negatively impact your store’s performance.
If you have the expertise to identify and remove unnecessary parts of an extension after purchasing it from a developer, this approach can work well. Otherwise, it’s best to rely on trusted sources to avoid potential issues.
Also, ensure that you are getting the extension that you really need. Too many extensions can negatively affect your store performance.
What are the Types of Magento Plugins?
There are three types of Magento Plugins:
Before Plugin
When a product is added to the cart, the core method calculates the final price and displays it to the customer. However, if you want to apply a discount before the final price is calculated—such as when a customer enters a coupon code—you need to use a before plugin. This ensures the discounting action is performed before the method runs.
After Plugin
If there is a method that calculates and displays the final price after products are added to the cart, an after plugin can be used to add tax to the total. Since the tax is applied after the base price calculation, the after plugin executes after the method completes.
Around Plugin
These plugins are more complex and should be used only when necessary. They wrap around a method, allowing you to modify its behavior before, after, or even prevent it from executing based on conditions.
For example, if you want to send an order confirmation email only when the order value exceeds ₹500, an around plugin can handle this. If the order value is greater than ₹500, the function executes, sending the email. If it’s less than ₹500, the function does not execute. However, in both cases, the order itself is still placed.
5 Best Magento Extensions and Plugins to Use
Amasty SEO Toolkit
This extension takes care of end-to-end SEO necessities and helps you rank higher in Google. It can assist you with finding duplicate content, optimizing metas, generate rich snippets, manage XML sitemaps, and find broken links.
One Step Checkout
This extension streamlines the entire checkout process into a single window, making it easier for customers to complete their purchases. Many shoppers abandon their carts due to a complicated checkout process, but One Step Checkout simplifies it, reducing drop-offs. It also allows you to customize the checkout flow based on your preferences for a smoother user experience.
Yotpo Product Reviews & UGC
With Yotpo Extension, you can manage customer reviews and ratings for your products. This extension integrates with Magento platform seamlessly helping you to improve your trust factor and thereby your conversions from user generated content, that is, customer reviews. It also helps you make better business decisions by displaying review-related analytics.
Stripe Payment
This is the out of the box extensions that we earlier mentioned. It comes with Magento installation and is used by almost all store owners to collect payments from their customers. The extension supports 135+ currencies, 20+ payment methods, secure card authorization, and detect spammy transactions. This makes your store PCI compliant.
You can read more about the best Magento payment gateways here.
Advanced Sphinx Search Pro
Make search operations on your store user-friendly by using this extension. It is fast and smart to even give correct results for long tail searches. It has a built-in synonyms dictionary with more than 60000 items and you can add more.
To Summarize
Magento Extensions and Plugins help you create a seamless store experience for your users at different touchpoints, without any major changes in the existing codes. With different types of extensions, you can control different aspects of your ecommerce store with ease. But you need to be careful while using third party extensions.
